Love Is Blindness - Composition and Theme

Composition and Theme

"Love Is Blindness" runs for 4:23 (4 minutes, 23 seconds). According to Hal Leonard Corporation's sheet music published at Musicnotes.com, it is played in common time at a tempo of 48 beats per minute in a key of B-flat minor.

The production team gave bassist Adam Clayton's bass a "low end bass throbbing effect", which The Edge described as "a real stroke of genius from the production team." Drummer Larry Mullen, Jr.'s drum pattern was taken from U2's 1987 single "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and slowed down. The lyrics " up the personal and the political." Bono noted that "There was some reference to the little death, which can be taken to mean a faint during orgasm but also works as an image of terrorism." Quoting the lyric "A little death without mourning / No call and no warning / Baby, a dangerous idea / That almost makes sense", he said, "There's nothing more deadly than an idea – or a person – that's almost right. You know, it took the 20th century a hundred years to get over communism. There's another dangerous idea that almost made sense."

"The song has images of terrorism, bomb-building, clockworks and cold steel, parked car. In a personal sense, I have observed the phenomenon of a person planting a kind of landmine that years later they will accidentally tread on and blow their lives to pieces. You can watch people doing it, wilfully getting involved in actions they will pay a very heavy price for later. Trajectory is everything."

U2 biographer Bill Flanagan credits Bono's habit of keeping his lyrics "in flux until the last minute" with providing a narrative coherence to the album. Flanagan interpreted Achtung Baby as using the moon as a metaphor for a dark woman seducing the singer away from his virtuous love, the sun; he is tempted away from domestic life by an exciting nightlife and tests how far he can go before returning home. For Flanagan, the final three songs on Achtung Baby—"Ultraviolet (Light My Way)", "Acrobat", and "Love Is Blindness"—are about how the couple deal with the suffering they have forced on each other. Uncut contributor Gavin Martin believed the song contained "images of love, debased or abandoned." He wrote, "With its stark, churchlike organ intro, pulsating bass synth and guitar reverb stretched into a hallucinatory squall, it brilliantly describes the discord and dread that provide a constant undertow to Achtung Baby. And yet, through its alluring sonic palette and wounded but sensual vocal, 'Love Is Blindness' also maps out a search for harmony and salvation".

Author Atara Stein wrote that the song "suggests that love can operate only through a willful self-deception, a voluntary surrender to what one knows is an illusion. The singer begs his lover to 'wrap the night' around him because, as he proclaims, 'I don't want to see.' The singer knows that the image he creates of his loved one is false, but it is the only image that can satisfy him. He must perceive his beloved in idealized terms, so she can reflect back to him the image of himself that he desires to see." Journalist Bill Graham believed the song was a bleak account of a failing romance. Hot Press editor Niall Stokes wrote that the song "takes us back – again – to the shadowy world of deceit, infidelity, and betrayal. It depicts love at the end, the very end, of its tether. It is as bleak and as despairing a view of the world as you're likely to get, reflecting the emotional climate in which the entire album had been made." He noted, "In terms of its mood, 'Love Is Blindness' had the dark, sensual and decadent feel of pre-war Berlin", adding that the lyric "Love is blindness / I don't want to see" was "a desolate acknowledgement of the terrible reality that it is sometimes better not to know."